I need some recomendations: Click Adventures

one day while playing through Lucas Art's "The Dig" for the 5th time, suddenly an idea popped into my head. "I want to make a graphical point and click adventure game of my own." The only problem is: I dont know how. Although I want to focus on the art part of it mainly, I need to know programming too. What programming language would be most useful? what do I need to know? what should I know? If it helps, I know HTML ptretty well...

Well you should look at this: http://www.scummvm.org/ as it is an emulator for the type of games that you're talking about. That said, you're most likely using said emulator to play the games...

If you know HTML, Flash isn't a bad place to start. Actionscript is pretty simple, and you can do pretty impressive things with Flash. I think that would be your best bet at first. Otherwise, perhaps one of the BASIC's. Other people can give you a more authoritative opinion on that...

Anyway, I've been wanting to develop an engine for this kinda thing for a while, but I've been busy with other things. Glad to see I am not the only one tinkering with this kinda idea, though. If you can come up with a convincing concept, maybe I'll resume work on that project...

If you want to go on to other projects later and you've got the time to learn it, Obj-C or C++ would be a good option. If you just want to get your feet wet and give programming a try, then BASIC would be a good option as well.

"Most nutritionists say that Twinkies are bad. But they're not, they're very very good."

Well, it's either that, or learn something more complicated. Flash and RunRev are easy, but you say you don't like Flash, and RunRev is mucho $. Your next step up is Java or BlitzMax, which are both good, but you have to spend some time learning to actually program. Or you could go compeltely mad and learn C++, C, or Obj-C/Cocoa.

Anyways, how is a point-and-click adventure different from a card-based game with animation? I could make something almost up to the level of Monkey Island with SilverCreator. (Monkey Island being another LucasArts game that runs on ScummVM, so I'm assuming it's very similar to The Dig.)

well, i have been reading up on java and cocoa a bit. Ive been tinkering with Indiana java (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/F.../indyjava/). Its easy, but trajecly outdated . I checked out that processing.org thing. Seems pretty cool. I guess what im saying is I want a way to create a money island type game, with good and (I guess) advanced coding, But hey; it took a whole team to make monkey island right ? I hope my ambitions arent too high, but if need be, I can start smaller.

thomas_a Wrote:well, i have been reading up on java and cocoa a bit. Ive been tinkering with Indiana java (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/F.../indyjava/). Its easy, but trajecly outdated . I checked out that processing.org thing. Seems pretty cool. I guess what im saying is I want a way to create a money island type game, with good and (I guess) advanced coding, But hey; it took a whole team to make monkey island right ? I hope my ambitions arent too high, but if need be, I can start smaller.

Well, creating a point and click game engine shouldn't be that hard, esp if you use one of the basics(I could probably whip one out with Realbasic rather fast) out there (or Flash, I've made simple point-n-click games in flash, altough, they didn't have inventories and such, but still). The hard thing(today) is to create all the art. There are loads of animations, big backgrounds, many of these games have long cutscenes etc.

But start simple, try to come up with a game idea that perhaps doesn't need that many animations etcâ€¦

Uhg... I need to go to sleep, I hope my post makes any sence, but I've been up for more then 25 hours now so chances are it doesn't

"Gameplay Uber Alles. And if you can make it psychedelic too, great!" - Jeff Minter

thomas_a Wrote:I guess what im saying is I want a way to create a money island type game.

Wouldn't we all. Wouldn't we all...

Do you mean by advanced coding you want an inventory and stuff? That may be a whole load more harder than just starting off with a click to go to next pic interface. Nearly in the realms of an advanced text game, go with making a point and go-to-other-pic-when-clicked game from scratch first. Then add in the inventory, bit by bit.

heres an off topic question: after extracting the indina java file from adove, It spat out LONG list o files ( a.class, z.class, r.class etc...) how can I put that into an xcode project so i make the java based game work with cocoa? is that impossible? it seemed to be able to build, but how do i hook up the nib file to it? or better yet, find out what all those files are?
oh yeah, this is what basically all the look like give or take a few lines. tis one is the d.class file:
package my_lib.a;